Gilian The Dreamer: His Fancy, His Love and Adventure. Munro Neil
he asked with some show at geniality. He leaned a hand upon a desk, and remembered that just on that corner he leaned on he had placed many a shilling as Candlemas and Han’sel Monday offerings when he was a schoolboy, before the farming, before the army and India, and those long years at home on the upper flat of the house up the street where Miss Mary sat the lee-lone homester among her wanderers returned.
“I was but showing him the handiwork of his daughter Miss Nan,” said Old Brooks pleasantly. “A somewhat healthy and boisterous lady, I assure you.”
“Oh! I have heard of her,” said the Paymaster, taking a pinch of maccabaw from his pocket, and leisurely lifting it to his nostril with the indifference of one with little interest in the subject. There was insult in the contempt of the action. The General saw it and flamed very hotly.
“And you have heard of a very handsome little lady,” said he, “remarkably like her handsome mother, and a very good large-hearted daughter.”
The Paymaster had an unpleasant little laugh that when he chose he could use with the sting of a whip though accompanied by never a word. He flicked the surplus of his snuff from his stock and gave this annoying little laugh, but he did not allow it to go unaccompanied, for he had overheard the General’s speech to Mr. Spencer.
“No doubt she’s all you say or think,” said he dryly, “I’m sure I’m no judge, but there’s a rumour abroad that she’s a big handful. A want of discipline perhaps, no more than that—”
“You know the old saying, Captain,” said the General, “bachelors’ bairns are aye well trained.”
The Paymaster started in a temper, and “I have a son,” said he, “and——”
The General smiled with meaning.
“——A son; at least I’ll make him that, and I’ll show you something of training!”
Turner smiled anew, with a mock little bow and a wave of the fingers, a trick picked up abroad and maddening in its influence on a man with the feeling that it meant he was too small to have words with.
“I’ll train him—I’ll train him to hate your very name,” said the Paymaster with an oath.
“I’m obliged for your cake and wine,” said the General, still smiling, “and I wish you all good day.” He lifted his hat and bowed and left the room.
“This is a most unfortunate contretemps,” said Brooks, all trembling. “If I had thought a little whistle, a mere tibia of ash, had power to precipitate this unlucky and unseemly belligerence I would never have opened my desk.”
The great bell upon the roof of the church swung upon its arms like an acrobat in petticoats, and loudly pealed the hour of seven. Its hammer boomed against the brassy gown, the town rang from end to end with the clamour of the curfew, and its tale of another day gone rumoured up the glens. Near at hand the air of the playground and of the street was tossed by the sound into tumultuous waves, so that even in the schoolroom the ear throbbed to the loud proclamation. Into the avenue streamed the schools of crows from their wanderings on the braes of Shira, and the children ceased their shinty play and looked up at the flying companies, and called a noisy song—
“Crow, crow, fly away home,
Your fires are out and your children gone.”
“That’s a most haughty up-setting crew, and the queue-haired rover the worst of the lot!” said the Paymaster, still red and angry. “What I say’s true, Brooks; it’s true I tell you! You’ll not for your life put it out of the boy’s head when you have the teaching of him; he must hate the Turners like poison. Mind that now, mind that now!”
And turning quickly on his heels, the Paymaster went out of the schoolroom.
CHAPTER V—THE BROTHERS
Gilian, meanwhile, sat on a high chair in Miss Mary’s room. She gave him soup till her ladle scraped against the bottom of the tureen; she cut for him the tenderest portions of the hen; she gave him most generously of cheese—not the plain skim-milk curd cheese of Ladyfield, the leavings of the dairy, but the Saturday kebboch as it was called, made of the overnight and morning’s milk, poured cream and all into the yearning-tub. And as she served him, her tongue went constantly upon themes of many varieties, but the background of them all, the conclusion of them all, was the greatness of her brothers. Ah! she was a strange little woman with the foolish Gaelic notion that an affection bluntly displayed to its object is an affection discreditable.
“You will go far,” said she to Gilian, “before you will come on finer men. They are getting old and done, but once I knew them tall and strong and strapping, not their equals in all the armies. And what they have seen of wars, my dear! They were ever going or coming from them, and sometimes I would not know where they were out in the quarrelsome world but for a line in the Saturday Post or the Courier or maybe an old hint in the General Almanack itself. Perhaps when you become acquainted with the General and the Cornal you will wonder that they are never at any time jocular, and maybe you will think that they are soured at life and that all their kindness is turned to lappered cream. I knew them nearly jocular, I knew them tall, light-footed laddies, running about the pastures there gallivanting with the girls. But that, my dear, was long ago, and I feel myself the old woman indeed when I see them so stiff and solemn sitting in there over their evening glass.”
“I have never seen them; were they at the funeral?” asked Gilian, his interest roused in such survivals of the past.
“That they were,” said Miss Mary; “a funeral now is their only recreation. But perhaps you would not know them because they are not at all like the Captain. He was a soldier too, in a way, but they were the ancient warriors. Come into the room here and I will show you, if you have finished your dinner.”
Gilian went with her into the parlour again among the prints and the hanging swords, that now he knew the trade and story of the men who sat among them, were imbued with new interests.
Miss Mary pointed to the portraits. “That was Colin and Dugald before they went away the second time,” she said. “We had one of James too—he died at Corunna—but it was the only one, and we gave it to a lady of the place who was chief with him before he went away, and dwined a great deal after his death. And that’s his sword. When it came home from Spain by MacFarlane, the carrier round from Dumbarton, I took it out and it was clagged in the scabbard with a red glut. It was a sore memorial to an only sister.”
The boy stood in the middle of the floor feeling himself very much older than he had done in the morning. The woman’s confidences made him almost a man, for before he had been spoken to but as a child, though his thoughts were far older than his years. Those relics of war, especially the sheath that had the glut of life in it corrupting when it came back with the dead man’s chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium. The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all the wonders or the shepherds’ battle stories round the fire, and he was in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting each other down. He saw—so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon his vest—the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face when the terrible life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils expanded, his eyes glistened; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it